by Will Hill
The room was identical to the one that he had inspected earlier, but this one wasn’t empty. Huddled in the corner was a monk, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs. His head was lowered, and he was shaking and weeping as Jamie crossed the room and knelt on the cold stone floor in front of him. Larissa stayed in the doorway, watching the corridor.
“Are you hurt?” asked Jamie, placing a hand on the man’s arm.
The monk raised his head, and Jamie cried out, shoving himself backwards across the stone floor.
A crucifix had been carved into the man’s face; across the ridge of his forehead and then down from his hairline, along the length of his nose, through his mouth, splitting his lips into flapping chunks, and down to the end of his chin. The wound was wide and deep, and blood was gushing down his ruined face and on to his habit.
“Oh God,” said Jamie.
At the mention of his Lord, the monk began to babble, a running stream of prayer.
“YeathoughIwalkthroughthevalleyoftheshadowofdeathIwillfearnoevilbeca usethouartwithme.”
Jamie stood up and backed away from the huddled shape, his face twisted with despair.
There’s nothing you can do for him. Think about your mother. Focus.
But he couldn’t. He could think only about the tortured, violated man curled into the corner in front of him, and wonder again what manner of creature he was dealing with, a creature that would inflict such savagery on men who had devoted their lives to peace.
“Come on,” said Larissa, softly, and he turned to look at her. “We have to keep moving. You can’t help him.”
He followed her out into the corridor, and they rounded the final corner together. On the ground in front of them, a large arrow had been painted with blood, pointing the way they were facing. Two words had been written beneath it.
THIS
WAY
Hatred spilled through Jamie, hatred for Alexandru and all his kind, a hatred that burned so hot in his chest he thought he would burst into flames.
“Does he think this is a game?” he hissed.
Larissa grabbed his arm.
“It is a game,” she said. “To him, that’s all this is. Ilyana, your father, your mother, those are just details. It’s violence, and pain, and misery that he loves. Remember that when you face him.”
A shout echoed down the corridor, and Jamie shone his torch along it. Morris, McBride and Kate were walking quickly down it, and Jamie and Larissa went to meet them.
The team was reunited in front of a large wooden door.
“What did you find?” asked Jamie.
“Later,” said McBride, his face drawn and pale, and Jamie nodded.
They stood in front of the door, the five of them, with Jamie in the centre.
This is it. No matter what lies behind this door, you don’t leave this place without her. You make her proud.
“Ready?” asked Morris.
Jamie took a deep breath.
“Ready,” he said, and pushed the door open.
But he wasn’t ready at all.
Chapter 45
THE TRUTH HURTS
Alexandru Rusmanov sat in the chapel hall, on a wooden chair so ornately carved it looked like a throne.
It stood on a raised stone platform at the back of the large hall. An enormous wooden cross stood behind it, before a tall stained-glass window that faced the grey surface of the North Sea, a hundred feet below. A wooden lectern, from which Jamie guessed the Abbot had conducted the monastery’s services, had been thrown aside, and lay broken on the stone floor.
A long wooden dining table had been treated with similar disdain; it lay smashed along one of the long walls of the hall, surrounded by the plain wooden chairs that had seated generations of the monks of Lindisfarne. Above it, set into alcoves along the high wall, were crude statues of saints. Their carved faces stared down solemnly into the middle of the hall, which now stood empty.
Then Jamie saw her.
His mother.
Marie Carpenter stood at Alexandru’s left, her face pale and tightly drawn.
“Mum!” he cried. He couldn’t help himself.
She’s alive. She’s still alive. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
His mother’s eyes lit up at the sound of his voice, and she looked at him with such love that he thought his heart might burst. She hadn’t realised that one of the figures that had entered the hall was her son, but even as relief flooded through her that he was still alive, Jamie was still alive, she was screaming at him not to come any closer, to stay away, to run for his life.
“Listen to your mother, boy,” advised Alexandru, his voice warm and friendly, and spread his arms wide.
Jamie had taken a step towards her, without realising he had done so, and he paused. He looked along the length of the stone platform, beyond Alexandru’s outstretched hands, and his heart sank.
Standing silently along the platform were more than thirty vampires, in a loose line. At Alexandru’s right was Anderson, the huge vampire with the child’s face. His shoulders rose like a ridge of mountains, vast and misshapen, a long black coat covering them and reaching almost to the floor. Beyond him, and beyond his mother on the other side, were vampires of every age and gender. A woman in her sixties, dressed in a prim trouser suit, stood alongside a skeletally thin teenage boy, wearing torn jeans and nothing else. His ribs stood out on his narrow torso, and his eyes were sunken into his skull. Beside his mother, looking at her in a way that made Jamie want to tear his eyes out, was a fat man in a shiny grey suit. His face was red, and a coating of sweat stood out on his forehead as he stared at Marie. The vampires looked contemptuously down at Jamie and his companions, while their master regarded him calmly.
“So,” Alexandru said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together, as though he were about to start a particularly exciting debate. “Jamie Carpenter. We meet again, if you’ll forgive the cliché.”
His eyes flickered to Jamie’s left, his attention caught by something. Then his face twisted into a scowl, and he stared at Larissa with his blood red eyes. “You,” he said, all the warmth gone from his voice. “You dare show your face in front of me again?”
“I dare,” replied Larissa.
“Your death will be my masterpiece,” Alexandru said, and grinned at her. “No creature on earth has ever suffered like you will suffer.”
“I’m not afraid of you any more,” said Larissa, staring up at the ancient vampire.
“You should be,” said Thomas Morris.
Then he pulled Quincey Morris’s bowie knife from his belt and ran it across McBride’s throat. The Operator fell to his knees, blood jetting from severed arteries, and folded to the floor. McBride was dead before Jamie had time to realise what had happened.
Morris walked slowly across the chapel hall, his head lowered, like a man going to the gallows, and stepped up on to the platform. Anderson moved aside to accommodate him, and Alexandru laughed gently as the Blacklight Operator took his place at his side.
Jamie stared at the platform, at Morris standing stiffly beside Alexandru, and realised he was dead. They all were; Larissa, Kate, his mother, and him.
All dead.
Oh no. Oh please, no.
“Tom,” he said. “Tom, what are you doing?”
Behind him he heard a small noise emerge from Kate’s throat, and a snarl emanate from Larissa.
Morris was looking down at Jamie with pure hatred; it twisted his features into a face he didn’t recognise. “I’m doing what needs to be done,” he said. “What should have been done a long time ago.”
Jamie felt tears welling up within him, and shoved them back down. He had never felt so utterly alone.
“But why?” he asked, in a broken child’s voice. “We’re friends. You said we were the same.”
Anger flashed across Morris’s face. “We are nothing alike,” he spat. “My family has been betrayed and held back by Blacklight for more than a century. Yours was
given every advantage, even though you never deserved them.”
He smiled cruelly at Jamie.
“You want to know why I did it, is that it? You want an explanation? Fine, I’ll tell you why. Your father killed my father.”
Morris sighed deeply, as though he had wanted to get this off his chest for a very long time. “He didn’t pull the trigger,” he continued. “But he might as well have done. Him, and Seward, and Turner, and the rest. He gave his life to Blacklight, and they turned on him at the first sign of trouble. They betrayed him, and sold him down the river, and they did it with smiles on their faces.”
“But we checked the logs,” said Jamie, desperately. “You haven’t accessed the Operational frequency in weeks. How did you give it to Alexandru? How did you tell him we were coming to Northumberland?”
Morris smiled at Jamie, a wicked grin that turned the teenager’s stomach.
“You should read your Juvenal, boy. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I’m the Security Officer. I can access the entire Blacklight network, including the security protocols; I can add, amend and delete anything I want, as I did the log of my accessing the frequency database. When your father, your arrogant, superior father, destroyed Ilyana, I reached out to Alexandru, and we came to an understanding. He would give me two things I wanted, and I would hand him Department 19; your family in particular. I sent him the maps that let him bring down the Mina, just like I hacked the personnel files and found him your address. You should have died the same night as your father. But someone interfered, and warned your father they were coming. So when he ran home to protect you, I faked the e-mail from your father to Alexandru, and framed him as the traitor. Alexandru could have you and your mother, and I would get him access to Julian later. But your father died, and you were hidden away. So I wrote the document that implicated Julian, making sure no one would suspect anyone else was involved, and spent years tracking down your whereabouts. Once I had it, I passed it on, and we moved against you and your mother.”
He glared at Larissa.
“But she failed to kill you, and the goddamn monster rescued you. I’ve been working to get you into the open, away from him, ever since. And now here we are. Blacklight are in Russia, on a rescue mission that is far, far too late to do any good. There’s no one to help you this time.”
Jamie stared at Morris, his whole body numb. His mother was looking at him with panic in her eyes, Larissa was snarling beside him, but he felt nothing, It was too much for him to bear, one last betrayal too many, and he was on the very edge of collapse.
“What did you get?” he asked. “What did you get for helping to kill my family?”
“Eternal life,” replied Morris, simply. “And the righting of the greatest wrong in Blacklight history: the death of my great-great-grandfather, Quincey Morris. He died on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere, while lesser men survived. But the Russians found his remains in 1902, when they recovered Dracula’s ashes. Alexandru is going to bring him back to me.”
“You’re wrong,” said Jamie “Dracula’s remains were never found.”
“You really shouldn’t believe everything the Department tells you,” replied Morris. “It’s a shame Seward isn’t here; if he was, you could ask him about vault 31. But he isn’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me. Dracula’s remains were recovered, along with my great-great-grandfather’s. And soon they will both walk the earth again.”
Grey was right, thought Jamie. We should have listened to him. Then he looked at Morris, saw the desperation lurking an inch beneath the surface of his face, and felt savage satisfaction flood through him.
“You idiot,” he said. “Quincey Morris wasn’t turned. He just died. They can’t bring him back. They’re just using you to get to Dracula’s ashes.”
Morris’s smile remained in place, but the light in his eyes faded. He looked at Alexandru, who was watching the exchange with obvious relish.
“That isn’t true,” he said. “You promised.”
Alexandru grinned; an expression of pure malice, of utter sadism. “It seems that even the valet’s great-grandson is cleverer than you,” he said.
Far, far too late, Morris saw how simply, and completely, he had been used. His face fell, as the realisation of what he had done sank into him, and he staggered on the raised platform.
You fool, thought Jamie, You poor, desperate fool. You’ve given away everything, for nothing. For absolutely nothing.
Morris let out a strangled cry, and fumbled the bowie knife from his belt. He lunged at Alexandru, who laughed delightedly, and slid liquidly to his feet. He reached out a hand and snapped Morris’s wrist, the sharp crack echoing around the chapel hall. Morris screamed, until Alexandru plucked the bowie knife from his fingers and slid it easily into his throat, silencing him.
Marie Carpenter screamed as blood sprayed across the pale stone platform. Morris took a single halting step, and then pitched forward, crashing to the floor of the hall. He lay there, blood pumping from the hole in his throat, his mouth working silently, his wide eyes fixed on Jamie.
“Oh God,” whispered Kate. “Oh God, this is too much. That poor man.”
Larissa flashed her a look of anger, but Jamie reached out and touched her arm. She looked at him, and he shook his head slowly. Her expression softened, and she returned her gaze to the platform, her red eyes gleaming.
“That was fun,” said Alexandru, settling back on his seat. “Now. Mr Carpenter. Why don’t you come up here with your mother and me? There are things we need to talk about, just the three of us.”
Larissa reached out and gripped Jamie’s hand so tightly he felt the bones grind together. With considerable effort, he stopped the pain showing in his face.
“Let my friends go, and I will,” he replied.
“Jamie—” started Larissa, but he cut her off.
“Be quiet, Larissa,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“They’re free to go,” said Alexandru. “You have my word. I couldn’t be less interested in the girl, and Larissa will keep for another day.”
Jamie nodded, and started forward. Larissa held on to his hand, pulling him back. He turned to her, a tender expression on his face.
“Let me go,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment, then released her grip.
Jamie walked towards Alexandru. The ancient vampire was sitting forward, clearly excited by the sight of the approaching teenager. His mother was staring down at him, her eyes full of terror. Behind him he heard Kate start to cry, and Larissa breathing heavily, in and out, in and out.
He was halfway across the chapel hall when the huge wooden door behind him exploded.
Chapter 46
STAND, AND BE TRUE
Frankenstein strode through the jagged hole where the door had been, followed by two Blacklight Operators, their visors down and their weapons drawn. The monster towered over them; he had drawn himself up to his full height, and he stared at Alexandru across the blood-soaked room. He was holding a T-Bone in one of his grey-green hands, an enormous silver shotgun in the other, and he was very, very angry.
“Where is Thomas Morris?” he bellowed, his voice reverberating around the stone walls.
Everybody in the room stopped dead.
Jamie pointed to the floor in font of the stage, his heart overwhelmed by the sight of his friend, his head spinning with gratitude and guilt and anger. Frankenstein saw Morris, his body twisted awkwardly, blood pumping steadily from the wide hole in his throat, the last of his life ebbing away. His eyes widened as the monster slowly approached, and knelt down on one knee, ten feet away from him.
“Thomas,” said Frankenstein, his voice low.
The dying man moved his eyes, slowly, and looked at him.
“Your great-great-grandfather would be ashamed of you,” the monster said.
Morris stared at him, his face a pale mask of fear and pain.
Then he died.
*
Sitti
ng on the platform, Alexandru applauded, slowly. The claps echoed around the room, and Frankenstein looked up at him. Then he walked quickly over to Jamie’s side, and led the teenager back to Kate and Larissa.
“Such theatre,” said Alexandru, a wide smile on his face. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. Now; come up here, boy. Your friends may still leave, even the rather large one, but I ask you not to try my patience further.”
Frankenstein looked at the old vampire, his face curled in a grimace of disgust.
“There’s no way that’s going to happen,” he said, firmly.
Alexandru sighed, a look of seemingly genuine disappointment on his face.
“Have it your way, monster.” He motioned to the vampires lined up beside him. “Kill them all, apart from the boy. Bring him to me.”
The vampires leapt down from the stone platform, and rushed headlong towards the remnants of the Blacklight team. Kate cried out as they sped across the stone, their eyes flashing, their fangs bared, their faces twisted with venom, and Frankenstein pushed her firmly back against the wall beside the door, behind Larissa and the Operators. He pressed a stake into her hand, and she held it out before her in a trembling fist.
One of the men who had arrived with Frankenstein fired his T-Bone into the snarling line of vampires. The projectile flew high, tearing off the upper half of the head of a vampire man in its twenties. He went down twitching, his eyes rolled back in his head. But as Jamie stared, the shattered, open skull began to repair itself before his eyes. He circled back against the wall, next to Kate. Larissa fell in next to him, and they pressed their backs to the cold stone as Frankenstein and the Operators faced the onrushing vampires.
Frankenstein took half a step back, then hurled himself forward, careening into the vampires, his huge, uneven arms whirling around him like tree trunks in a tornado. Vampires flew through the air, trailing blood behind them, and crashed into the walls. The second Operator emptied his MP5 into a cluster of vampires that were trying to surround him, driving them back, before a snarling vampire appeared behind him, and wrenched the helmet from his head. Frankenstein swung a long arm, placed the enormous barrel of the shotgun against the side of the vampire’s head, and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening in the stone hall, and the vampire’s head disappeared in a cloud of blood.
